Some years ago, Helena Mironenko, 34, back then a middle-level government official, put a series of photos of herself online that caused uproar in her home city of Krasnoyarsk, the capital of a region three times bigger than France. On one of them, this young head of the Department for Cultural Mass Actions of the Krasnoyarsk Region Administration drinks alcohol from the big bottle sittin on the edge of a children’s sandbox in public park.

On another, happily smiling, she shows her middle finger to the viewers, displaying a nail manicured with the color of the October Revolution.